The new wild Why invasive species will be nature's salvation

Fred Pearce

Book - 2015

In an era of climate change and widespread ecological damage, it is absolutely crucial that we find ways to help nature regenerate. Embracing the new ecology, Pearce shows us, is our best chance. To be an environmentalist in the twenty-first century means celebrating nature's wildness and capacity for change.

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Subjects
Published
Boston : Beacon Press [2015]
Language
English
Main Author
Fred Pearce (-)
Physical Description
xvi, 245 pages ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780807033685
  • On Language
  • Acronyms
  • Introduction: Nature in a World of Humans
  • Part 1. Alien Empires
  • Chapter 1. On Green Mountain
  • Chapter 2. New Worlds
  • Chapter 3. All at Sea
  • Chapter 4. Welcome to America
  • Chapter 5. Britain: A Nation Tied in Knotweed
  • Part 2. Myths and Demons
  • Chapter 6. Ecological Cleansing
  • Chapter 7. Myths of the Aliens
  • Chapter 8. Myths of the Pristine
  • Chapter 9. Nativism in the Garden of Eden
  • Part 3. The New Wild
  • Chapter 10. Novel Ecosystems
  • Chapter 11. Rebooting Conservation in the Urban Badlands
  • Chapter 12. Call of the New Wild
  • Latin Names
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by Booklist Review

Any mention of invasive species in the news or in conversation is typically followed by brainstorming discussions about how to eradicate something so obviously harmful. But what if these apparently alien creatures, whether animals or plants, can actually be a good thing and even revitalize stagnant or dying ecosystems? Once a die-hard supporter of protecting wilderness areas from outside invaders, environmental journalist and author Pearce (The Land Grabbers, 2012) presents an abundance of evidence here that demonstrates foreign species more often benefit so-called native species than threaten them. Pearce begins by highlighting the obvious and more famous exceptions when an invasive species has decimated a local one, mostly on remote islands such as the Pacific Ocean's Henderson Island, where interloping Polynesian rats have eliminated a high percentage of indigenous seabirds. Yet, in chapters such as Ecological Cleansing and Myths of the Pristine, Pearce shows that biodiversity actually increases more frequently than it decreases when newer wildlife marches in. Must reading for environmentalists of every stripe, and an optimistic report on the resilience of nature in a world of constantly shifting ecosystems.--Hays, Carl Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Environmental journalist Pearce (The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth, 2012, etc.) examines the effects of introduced species and our responses to them. It is time to stand back and look at the evidence when we come to judge and respond to "invasive" species, writes the author; at this point, pretty much the majority of species is invasive rather than endemic. Pearce appears ready to swing the pendulum away from conserving the "pristine" to utterly "novel ecosystems," and part of that change will entail sometimes-irksome invasive species. Nature is dynamic and cannot be conserved in aspic; on the other hand, to claim a noninterventionist approach is just as unreal, since humans are forever intervening in nature's progress. When Pearce writes, "we need to lose our fear of the alien and the novel," he hits the nail on the head. When he follows that line with, "It means conservationists must stop spending all their time backing loser speciesthe endangered and the reclusive," he sounds like a crank eugenicist. Are alien species really "nature at its best"? However, few would disagree with the author that introduced species do not deserve to be ecologically cleansed. Yes, Pearce admits, alien species can cause us "inconvenience," but then how does it follow that we should "let [nature] run wild"? For the most part, the author brings the balanced perspective of a seasoned, freethinking environmental reporter, pushing points that need to be madenature is a hothouse of change, an often temporary arrangement, and open to being remadeand what we think of as invasive is mostly hardiness and lack of competition that in many instances finds a new equilibrium, the incomers becoming "model eco-citizens." Pearce's book could use some pruning and shaping of its own, but his theme is significant: There is no going back when change is the norm. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

From the Introduction: "Nature in a World of Humans" Rogue rats, predatory jellyfish, suffocating super-weeds, wild boar, snakehead fish wriggling across the land--alien species are taking over. Nature's vagabonds, ruffians, and carpetbaggers are headed for an ecosystem near you. These biological adventurers are traveling the world in ever greater numbers, hitchhiking in our luggage, hidden in cargo holds, stuck to the bottom of ships, and migrating to keep up with climate change. Today's human-dominated world of globalized trade and messed-up ecosystems is giving footloose species many more chances to cruise the planet and set up home in distant lands. Some run riot, massacring local species, trashing their new habitats, and spreading diseases. Most of us like a simple story with good guys and bad guys, and aliens always make easy enemies. So the threat of foreign species invading fragile environments and causing ecological mayhem gets our attention. Conservationists have for half a century been battling to hold back the tide of aliens. They call them the second biggest threat to nature, after habitat loss. Their concern is laudable. They want to protect native species and the ecosystems they inhabit. But do we fear these ecological outsiders too much? Most environmentalists would recoil to think this, but maybe our fear is sometimes little more than green xenophobia. Most of us are appalled when foreign humans are treated as somehow intrinsically dangerous. Yet the orthodoxy in conservation is to demonize foreign species in just that way. Native is good and alien is bad. But is this simple formula true? Or might we need the go-getter, can-do aliens? Might their success be a sign of nature's resilience in the face of the considerable damage humans have done to the planet? I am an environmental journalist. Even to ask such questions gets me treated in some circles as a conservation heretic. I have met incredulity and hostility in equal measure. To be clear, I am not accusing environmentalists of being closet xenophobes or misanthropes, still less racists. But I have also found that I am far from alone in my concern that we have bought into some dangerous mythology about how nature works. I am not questioning the motives--to strengthen nature--but the means. Many ecologists who actually study nature have told me that they feel conservationists are, with the best of intentions, getting the aliens wrong. And worse, that their efforts to keep out all foreign invaders of ecosystems might often be counterproductive, weakening nature rather than strengthening it. I have discovered that there is a scientific backlash against the simple formula that natives are good and aliens bad. The purpose of this book is to explore that new thinking and to ask what it should mean for conservation. My conclusion is that mainstream conservationists are right that we need a rewilding of the Earth, but they are wrong if they imagine that we can achieve that by going backward. We need a new wild--hence the title of this book. But the new wild will be very different from the old wild. We have changed our planet too much, and nature never goes backward. Nature's resilience is increasingly expressed in the strength and colonizing abilities of alien species. They are often the new natives. And in the new wild, we need to stand back and applaud. There are horror stories about alien takeovers, of course. Most of those stories are set on small remote islands with only a few native species, where carnivorous rats, cats, and others hop off ships and cause mayhem. But elsewhere, most of the time, the tens of thousands of introduced species usually either swiftly die out or settle down and become model eco-citizens, pollinating crops, spreading seeds, controlling predators, and providing food and habitat for native species. They rarely eliminate natives. Rather than reducing biodiversity, the novel new worlds that result are usually richer in species than what went before. Even the "terrorists" of the conservation world, such as zebra mussels and tamarisk, Japanese knotweed and water hyacinth, often have a good side we rarely hear about. After going on the trail of alien species across six continents, my conclusion is that their demonization says more about us and our fears of change than about them and their behavior. Some ardent wildlife lovers show a dark side when it comes to aliens. I sometimes think the more ardent they are, the more likely they are to be rabid about alien species. Understandable love of the local, the native, and the familiar--of an imagined pristine environment before humans showed up--too often becomes fear and hatred of the foreign and the unfamiliar. This hostility is generally justified by outdated and ill-founded ideas about how nature works. We often think of life on Earth as made up of complex and tightly knit ecosystems like rainforests, wetlands, and coral reefs that are perfected and stable, with every species evolved to have a unique role. With that vision of nature, alien species are at best disruptive and at worst plain bad. But where did this idea come from? Darwin certainly never expressed it. He wrote that natural selection allowed species to adapt and survive, but he said nothing about ecosystems evolving to some sort of perfect state. They were just a jumble of species making their way in the world. Today, fewer and fewer ecologists believe nature is either stable or perfectible. Real nature, they say, is often random, temporary, and constantly being remade by fire, flood, and disease--with species coming and going, fitting in, adapting, or losing out. Change is the norm, they say. In this vision of nature, alien species are just like any others. Whether brought by humans or in more traditional ways, they are not an intrinsic threat to ecosystems. They are part of nature doing its thing, constantly reordering itself, constantly submitting to random events. Aliens may or may not cause change, but if change is the norm, then there is no harm in that. In any case, when invaded by foreign species, ecosystems don't collapse. Often they prosper better than before. The success of aliens becomes a sign of nature's dynamism, not its enfeeblement. This new ecological thinking is critical for how we understand the meaning of conservation and for what actions we take in the name of protecting nature. If nature is perfected and vulnerable to outsiders, then conservationists have to line the barricades to keep out the interlopers and restore the balance of nature. That's what most conservationists think, and for a long time I shared that view. But if it is wrong, then keeping out aliens serves no obvious purpose. More than that, it may be counterproductive. Nature's desperados are proven colonists and exploiters of the ecological mess that humans leave behind them. So surely that makes them nature's best chance of healing the damage done by chain saws and plows, by pollution and climate change. Far from being nature's destroyers, aliens may be its reinvigorators, its salvation. They may be a sign that nature is not done. That it can bounce back. If that thinking is right, then simple conservation is shortsighted, and true environmentalists should be applauding the invaders. I do not want to suggest that we should always welcome every alien species. We humans may sometimes want to protect the species we know and love--in the habitats that we are familiar with. There is nothing wrong with that. And where alien species cause us inconvenience--whether zebra mussels in American waterways, rats on oceanic islands, or rabbits in Australia-- we may want to try to halt their spread. Again, that is fair enough. We have a legitimate need to curb some of those excesses and a legitimate desire to protect what we like best. But we should be clear that when we do this, it is for ourselves and not for nature, whose needs are usually rather different. While we seek to protect what we like in nature, we should remember something else. There is very little that is truly natural in nature anymore. There are very few, if any, pristine ecosystems to be preserved. Thanks to the activities of humans over thousands of years, no forests are virgin. They are all regenerating from past human invasions. We live in a new geological era, the Anthropocene, in which nothing is undisturbed and most ecosystems are a hodgepodge of native and alien species, often getting on in unexpected and productive ways. Over my years as a journalist, I have written plenty of articles about how much harm alien species appear to do--about killer algae, marauding water hyacinth, and many more. There was truth in them all, but they missed the bigger picture. This book is my journey to discover what conservation should really be about in the twenty-first century. It should not be about trying to preserve nature in aspic, still less about trying to recreate the past. That is both impossible and an affront to nature, like trying to turn the world into a giant zoo. In the twenty-first century, rather than fighting a losing battle to protect what we imagine to be pristine nature, we should be encouraging nature's rebirth, often through the dynamism and invasive instincts of its alien species. Nature does not exist to do our bidding. While alien species may sometimes be a pain in the neck for human society, they are often exactly the shot in the arm that real nature needs. Conservationists who want to cosset nature like a delicate flower, to protect it from the threat of alien species, are the ethnic cleansers of nature, neutralizing the forces that they should be promoting. It is foolish to fear nature at its most dynamic--red in tooth and claw, rhizome and spore, root and branch. As true environmentalists, we should rejoice when species burst through the paving stones of our cities or wash up on foreign shores. We should celebrate nature's powers of recovery. We should let it run wild. How else are species to thrive and respond to the disruption of our activities, including climate change, if not by invading new territories, by becoming aliens? True nature lovers should see that. Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, the guru of biodiversity and rainforests, said that the twenty-first century will be "the era of restoration in ecology." I hope so. But we will not be going back to a supposedly pristine world. We cannot. We should be restoring nature's wildness, not trying to turn one moment in its past into an ossified museum relic. The new wild will be different but no less dramatic and wonderful than the old wild. Alien species, and the novel ecosystems they inhabit, will be at the heart of it. We should bring them on. Excerpted from The New Wild: Why Invader Species Will Be Nature's Salvation by Fred Pearce All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.